Courage is needed to ensure grooming gangs inquiry stays the course

There are good intentions from Labour, but Jess Phillips must rise to meet this challenge as weaponisation ramps up.

Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips

Every government promises to listen to women, but only a few are willing to hear them when their truths are inconvenient, uncomfortable, or messy.

Here, the grooming gangs inquiry was meant to be a turning point. After years of resistance, its creation was proof Britain could finally face one of its darkest institutional failures with honesty and empathy. Few challenges are more politically fraught, but this was to be a government unafraid of uncomfortable truths, willing to seize the narrative from far-right insurgents and deliver accountability to the communities that long ago lost faith in Westminster.

Instead, it has become another test of whether Labour’s promise to halve violence against women and girls means anything in practice. This week, four survivors walked out of the inquiry, accusing Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips of “betrayal” after she publicly contradicted their concerns about its direction. Phillips insists she was correcting misinformation, not dismissing their experiences. But that distinction doesn’t land when you’ve spent a lifetime being told you’re exaggerating or lying. For those women, it felt like déjà vu: the state once again deciding which truths are convenient enough to hear.

The truth is, Labour is walking an impossible tightrope. On one side are survivors with every reason to mistrust institutions, even when those institutions mean to do better. The two proposed inquiry chairs — a social worker and a police officer — have both now stepped down. For survivors failed by those very authorities, their understandable suspicion is more memory than paranoia.

On the other side is a right-wing opposition eager to weaponise their pain. Kemi Badenoch has already turned the inquiry into a soundbite about Labour failure. Nigel Farage continues to claim the biggest threat to women is immigrants. For the right, survivors’ trauma is political ammunition: a culture war about who cares more for “our women”, laced with dog-whistle racism and misogyny.

On the tightrope itself sits a government desperate to get it right. Phillips has spent her career fighting for victims of abuse. Before politics, she worked at Women’s Aid, helping women escape violent homes. She has been a tireless advocate for the many women murdered by men each year. But good intentions don’t erase the decades of pain, neglect and mistrust that now shape how every move is read. And so, despite the sincerity of its mission, this government looks like one that promised to listen but has ended up managing: filing away difficulties into bureaucratic boxes marked “too difficult”, “too loud”, or “too messy”.

The survivors say they were gagged, forced to sign confidentiality agreements and banned from speaking to anyone, not even each other, about their experiences. For any woman who has had her voice shut down by the system, this is how it starts: management is exactly what survivors have had too much of.

All of this makes the moment profoundly dangerous. If the government fumbles, the moral ground will be ceded to those willing to turn violence against women into a wedge issue. Worse, at a time of record-low trust, the state will once again have shown that it looks out for itself, silencing those who challenge it and retreating from accountability. For survivors, that betrayal would be unspeakable. Their pain, once again thrust into the spotlight, only to be met with silence.

Keir Starmer’s government has set a bold goal to halve violence against women and girls within a decade. But ambition without consistency undermines its cause. Recent decisions show why survivors are sceptical: Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to Washington — despite his well-documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein — wasn’t just tone-deaf, it was insulting. The DASH domestic violence risk assessment tool, long condemned as dangerously outdated, remains unreformed. And the family courts — where victims are routinely retraumatised and children left at risk — are absent from the agenda entirely. These are the systems in which violence festers and justice fails.

There are pockets of progress, and they matter. Labour MP Alex McIntyre’s “safe leave” amendment, guaranteeing paid leave for domestic abuse survivors, is the kind of humane, practical policymaking Labour needs more of. So is the tireless work of Stella Creasy, who’s fought to make public spaces safer for women, and Sarah Champion, who has spent a decade exposing the state’s complicity in grooming scandals. They show what it looks like when moral clarity meets political courage.

At the centre of government, though, Labour still feels trapped in the cautious reflexes of a government terrified of controversy. Inquiries are to be “managed”, victims to be “consulted”. Empathy becomes at tick box in a press release, not something you practice in power.

Phillips knows what survivors need, but in government she’s become part of the machinery she once railed against. And that’s the real question for Labour: will it lead with courage, or hide behind management? Because good intentions are not enough if it can’t learn to listen with an understanding of the decades of hurt that shape this landscape. Without that, its promises to women will end the way so many stories of violence do: in silence.■

About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster. Zoë then worked as a policy and politics reporter at the New Statesman, before joining the Independent as a political correspondent. When not writing about politics and policy, she is a regular commentator on TV and radio and a panellist on the Oh God What Now podcast.

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If there’s a story you think we should be telling about child poverty then contact zoe@thelead.uk

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